This Sci-Fi Author Thinks Amazon Will Cause an Apocalypse

John Earle

Charles Stross is an award-winning science fiction author whose books include The Bloodline Feud, about timeline-hopping narco-terrorists, Halting State, a near-future crime thriller set in Scotland, and The Rapture of the Nerds, a humorous take on the technological singularity. He’s also the author of The Laundry Files series, which blends spy thrillers, Lovecraftian horror, and workplace humor. The latest Laundry novel, The Rhesus Chart, suggests that using a Kindle might make you susceptible to the malign sorcery of Jeff Bezos. It’s an idea inspired by Stross’s real-life experiences with Amazon.

“Don’t get me started on Amazon,” Stross says in Episode 114 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. “My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.”

He’s in good company. Amazon’s habit of removing pre-order buttons from their store in order to pressure publishers into accepting its terms has affected lots of authors, and alienated such big names as Stephen King, John Grisham, and Jennifer Egan. And while the Lovecraftian armageddon codenamed Case Nightmare Green exists only in Stross’ novels, he thinks a very real apocalypse could befall the world if Amazon prevails.

“Let’s just say they want to be a monopoly as much as Google or Facebook want to be a monopoly,” he says, “and if they get their way it’s going to be a pretty scary contingency, since the internet as we know it will no longer exist.”

“‘A Colder War’ started when I was looking at At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, which had some moments of sublime horror in it—it’s one of his classic stories. However, Lovecraft’s horror has very much been devalued in recent decades. It’s reached the point where we have plush Cthulhu dolls and bedroom slippers, where it’s a suitable subject matter for jokes or comics. It lacks the level of cosmic horror that it originally came with. In 1992, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, I was trying to think how to put the horror back into H.P. Lovecraft, and I suddenly realized you make it something that truly is horrifying. Nineteen ninety-two was just after the end of the Cold War, and if you were alive back then, you lived with the ever-present knowledge that vast cool intelligences thousands of miles away might at any moment be making decisions that would unleash the power of a thousand suns and basically melt the skin from your face, and kill everyone around you and destroy everything you hold dear, for entirely abstract reasons relating to an ideological struggle that never really touches you directly.”

“For a couple years after 1989 there was a queue of already-sold technothrillers in the pipeline about World War III in Europe between the Soviet Union and NATO, and you can just see the authors tearing their hair out as the books come dribbling out two years after the Warsaw Pact collapsed. You can imagine how their sales stunk. I think we may be seeing a much more subtle effect today from the Snowden revelations, because what has happened is they’ve massively eroded public faith in not merely the ability to function of the security services, but their very reason for existing. Now, I began writing the Laundry series in 1999, and back then the whole Snowden thing just wasn’t on the radar … I’m not sure actually how to address this in the Laundry series yet. I’m still digesting it. What I can say is I’m working on a different spy thriller trilogy set in my Merchant Princes universe, with publication in a year to 18 months, that is my definitive post-Edward Snowden spy thriller.”

Nintendo Entertainment System Panel

John Joseph Adams on his stolen Nintendo:

“[Zelda II:] The Adventure of Link is sort of my saddest memory from my videogame years when I was a kid, because I was playing the game and I was three-quarters of the way through, and my house got robbed. Our house actually got robbed three times in the span of a month or two, and the first time the robbers didn’t take my Nintendo or any of my games, but the second time they took it, and they took all my games, so I lost all my progress on The Adventure of Link … I lived in Florida, and we lived way out on the outskirts of town where it hadn’t really been developed yet, so my house was the only house on my street, and there were just a bunch of empty lots around us, and we were right next to I-95, so people could drive by and see that there were no cars in front of our house, so it wasn’t very secure … It wasn’t even that I had lost the Nintendo. It was that I had lost all my progress on The Adventure of Link.”

“There were all these things going on behind the scenes that I really had no idea about as a kid. There was this other Nintendo that wasn’t just the happy joyful one … I realized that there were no good guys or bad guys. It really was just all these different houses with their own philosophies, and they all thought they were entitled to be king of the mountain. So between Sony, Sega, Nintendo, and even the third parties, it really felt like Game of Thrones. When I wrote the Nintendo chapters I felt like I genuinely hated Sega, and when I wrote the Sega chapters I genuinely hated Nintendo, and it was just these great larger-than-life characters … Definitely Nintendo [is most like the Lannisters]. Nintendo has the best balance sheet and financials possible. Even though they’ve been doing terribly with the Wii U. … And Sega were more of these upstarts that I guess I liken more to the Stark family.”